What fruit has John Steinbeck's 'Grapes of Wrath' borne?

A classic and best-seller by turns hailed and reviled

John Steinbeck wrote 17 novels. Many received international acclaim but none more than his 1939 "The Grapes of Wrath," a soul-shattering tale of an Oklahoma farm family who made their reluctant way west, fleeing the wind-torn and scorched plains of home, surviving a dignity-killing trial of want and loss, to arrive in the inhuman farm fields of California.

The book received the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for literature, though it was banned in the very county where its protagonists found themselves on the last page. It was also part of the jury's decision-making in awarding Steinbeck the 1962 Nobel Prize for literature. The book's annual sales now number around 150,000, though the publisher has done the math on the book's cumulative sales and, since 1939, it has sold 8.3 million copies.

At the turn of the century, "The Grapes of Wrath" was on Book magazine's list of 50 best-selling books, at No. 11. It is regularly placed on lists of books that changed America. Numerous lists place it as one of the premier works of the 20th century.

To mark the book's 75th anniversary, three new versions – a hardcover, a limited leather-bound, and a Penguin Classics paperback – were published last week.

The National Steinbeck Center in Salinas will celebrate the 75th anniversary of publication of "The Grapes of Wrath" by convening a national dialogue, which the curators say will "seek out the experiences of individual Americans today and bring them into the light."

May 2-4, the Steinbeck Festival will feature three speakers, 10 Steinbeck Country tours, two major events, nine authors, artists and musicians. On Saturday night, 6-8 p.m., a gala complete with 1930s music and cocktails will include the unveiling of works inspired by the novel.

For a complete list of the weekend's activities or to purchase advance tickets, go to steinbeck.org.

The National Steinbeck Center has also developed several educational programs designed for use by librarians, teachers, book clubs and community groups. They are also available at steinbeck.org.

Although many of our neighbors had lived through hard times indeed, and John Steinbeck's novel rekindled misery for some, mostly the old folks didn't talk to us about the bad old days; they kept those memories muted. By the mid-1940s, on long summer evenings, our Oildale neighbors might sit on porches and chat, perhaps play guitars or fiddles, and evoke their old homes with songs traditional (like “Red River Valley”) or new (like “Dear Okie”). A boy my age named Merle Haggard, who could imitate Lefty Frizzell, was the envy of us all.

One afternoon about then my father and I stopped at the market in Edison to pick up groceries. A few men with bedrolls squatted near the door of the store. One stood and approached my father. They spoke briefly, then my dad entered the building. Pop emerged a few minutes later with two bags of groceries, one of which he handed to the man with whom he'd spoken. They shook hands. When I asked my father who those guys were, he said simply, “Working men out of work.”

In fact, work was sacred to his generation. About then, too, I took notice of a small camp on one bank of the Kern River – tents and cars and shacks built of cardboard and plywood – and I remembered that a couple of my classmates who attended school barefoot were said to live there. My father, an oil worker from Texas, called the area “Hooverville.”

What has come to be called "the Dust Bowl migration" lasted well into the 1940s and encompassed far more than the Dust Bowl. By then “the War” had heated up California's economy and most migrants eventually found jobs. By then, too, I had entered junior high and like most of my pals had begun seasonal farm labor.

A couple of years later I saw the movie “The Grapes of Wrath,” then heard from a classmate there was a dirty book based on the film.

I immediately tried to check a copy out of the local library, but was refused access. I finally coughed up 25 cents and bought a paperback version.

The story stunned me because I recognized the characters; they were our neighbors ... from Arkansas, from Missouri, from Oklahoma, from Texas – the lucky ones with oilfield jobs or the unlucky ones surviving on seasonal farm labor. I had no idea they had endured such poverty.

Although the truth of Steinbeck's novel gave me my first nudge toward becoming a writer, I was struck that he didn’t mention the social/racial segregation we took for granted in the Bakersfield area then, or even all the non-white Depression migrants such as the black jocks against whom I competed in high school, many of them also “Texies,” “Arkies,” and “Okies.”

I also quickly learned that many local folks believed that “The Grapes of Wrath” was an insult to both Oklahoma and Kern County; it was disdained mostly by people who hadn't bothered to read it. Somehow I assumed the novel was about justice and about our obligations to one another as fellow human beings, not about Kern's agricultural economics or Dust Bowl history. The story I sensed seemed false to some, and even today resentment smolders.

Yet when I read “The Grapes of Wrath” as a kid, when the very word “breast” could cause me to hyperventilate, Rose of Sharon offering hers to a starving stranger in the novel's climatic scene wasn't sexual to me. I thought the Joads – even the ones in Oildale – were at last embracing their obligation as part of the human family, and I thought, as my father once said, that Steinbeck had “nailed it.”

Gerald Haslam is a writer who was born in Bakersfield two years before “The Grapes of Wrath” was published. He wrote “Okies: Selected Stories” in 1973, “The Other California: The Great Central Valley in Life and Letters” in 1990, “Coming of Age in California” in 1993, “Working Man Blues: Country Music in California” in 1999, among a raft of other fiction and nonfiction books, anthologies, newspaper and magazine articles. He is a member of Friends of Steinbeck, a professional organization, and lives with his wife in Sonoma County.

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